Kaushik Dasgupta

Articles By Kaushik Dasgupta

Brearley's latest book, On Cricket, traverses 50 years of the sport with palpable intellectual curiosity. It’s the work of a person who delighted in the aesthetics of the sport even when he was competing.

Like Inspector Montalbano, the solitary eater will endorse that a table for one is often a deeply satisfying affair. In popular and academic literature, meals are about love, bonhomie, gifting, making friends, cementing social relationships.

The annual flooding of the basins of rivers like the Brahmaputra is difficult to prevent. Not so the increasingly common deluges in India’s biggest cities — manmade disasters only exacerbated by unusual rainfall.

Activities of kings, nobles, farmers, traders and scientists have contributed to the oeuvre of Indian summer fruits. The Grand Trunk Road once was lined with mulberry trees by the Mughal rulers and their feudatories.

Communal politics around the biryani has scant respect for its fabled history or diversity. Is it the Persian pilao, improvised and transformed? Is it the result of avant garde experiments in royal kitchens? Or is it a plebeian dish, shaped, like India, by trade and cultural interaction?

On August 4, Water Resources Minister Uma Bharti told Lok Sabha that the government was planning to create “fish ladders” in the Ganga near the Farakka Barrage to help hilsa travel upstream to spawn — hopefully improving the catch.